A Conversation with Nyla Watson
on A Sondheim Girl at The Green Room 42
It’s a real pleasure to welcome Nyla Watson, whose Broadway and national tour credits include Hadestown, Wicked, The Color Purple, and Waitress, to The Sondheim Hub. On March 22nd, Stephen Sondheim’s birthday, Nyla brings A Sondheim Girl to The Green Room 42: a concert celebrating the women at the heart of his work, and her own deep relationship with his material. I spoke to Nyla ahead of the show about what draws her to Sondheim’s heroines, what his writing has given her as a performer, and why, right now, she feels more like a Sondheim girl than ever.
Our conversation begins below:
Thank you for reading! Upgrade to a premium subscription for full access to The Sondheim Hub: an exclusive essay, crossword, extended interview & more each week, plus our complete, paywall-free library of 250+ essays, features & interviews.
It’s so good to meet you. We’re talking ahead of your concert, A Sondheim Girl, at The Green Room 42 — which you’re performing on Sondheim’s birthday, March 22. What made you want to pull this particular collection of songs together for this particular concert?
Yes, I’m so excited. This is so special to me. I feel super honored to be talking to you, so thank you so much for inviting me to The Sondheim Hub.
I wanted to pull this group of songs together because it literally is me. The title of the concert is A Sondheim Girl, and I just know the reality of the women that he writes about. I say I know the reality because I relate so much to their struggle, their insecurities, their proclivities to making mistakes and trying to cover them up. I know the back and forth that they go through in their own mind. We hear it in the meter of the text, we hear it in the tempo, the diction, in the elongation of vowels sometimes. So, now more than ever, I do feel like a Sondheim girl personally.
And I am hopefully in the middle of a transition in my career, where I am presenting myself as more of a leading lady — presenting myself as someone who can command center stage and carry the show. These women hold so much weight under that spotlight. They are able to shift the narrative in ways that their male counterparts aren’t written to. I really believe in the gravity of their presence, and I wanted to embody that as much as I possibly could.
With a body of work like Sondheim’s, you could put a hundred different shows together. What was your starting point for deciding this program?
I definitely wanted to give Bernadette her flowers. There were a couple of songs I absolutely had to sing, and I would say those are the songs that will be starting both acts. “Sunday in the Park with George” is what I’m starting with, and then I’m starting the second half of the show with the version of “Johanna” she did at her Carnegie Hall concert — and so I’m singing it in the original key, up the octave. Those two songs were the catalyst for the concert. They didn’t start as the opening numbers for both acts of the show, but now they are, and I think that just makes so much sense.
I’ll definitely be talking and knitting things together, too. As I was putting the playlist together, I wanted to start with Bernadette, and then navigate through a lot of Sondheim’s leading women. That’s kind of the first half of the show. The second half is more like my love letter personally to Sondheim: the things that I love about him, the things that I needed from him, the mindset shifts that come along with learning and navigating his material.
I always want to start my concerts with a thank you, so I think the first half is really that thank you to those women who laid the foundation for me to feel like it’s possible to even navigate this material well. Because, as you know, it can be very complicated and very complex. There’s a lot of language, very hard intervals, a lot of slang in the material too. If you look at a lot of Mrs. Lovett’s lines, the English slang that Sondheim uses is just so dope. He’s so smart. And so you have to match that intelligence with your level of talent, but also your prowess as a performer overall. I am one who tends to choose the hard thing, so Sondheim feels very natural to me — my gifts feel very at home in his material.
Your career is so rich and varied in terms of roles and the types of shows you’ve been part of. How do you see Sondheim’s work within that wider picture of what you do?
Sondheim, especially when he started, is very post-Golden Age. It really is the connective tissue of the ages of musical theatre. Though he is singular, he walks alongside the skillset needed for traditional musical theatre in a really interesting way. People say: if you can survive in New York, you can live anywhere. I feel the same way about Sondheim’s music. If you can get through a Sondheim, you can pretty much do anything. And for the people who do it well, when you then put another piece of music in front of them, it’s like, oh, I’ve got this.
And I also think that the people most inspired by Sondheim — the composers who love him, the people he has mentored — they’re the movers and shakers of what we now know as contemporary musical theatre. His footprint, his stamp, his voice is all over this art form in general, and not just in his own work.
I try to find the similarities between different writers, and I think Sondheim is my way in to other material. Because if I can kill this melodic line over these dissonant chords in these odd-time-signature shows, then when that shows up in a Waitress, or in a Hadestown, or in all these other shows that I’ve been lucky enough to work in, then I’ve done the job. And attention to text: when you think about performing in Wicked, there’s so much messaging and imagery in the text. That’s Sondheim. You think about Hadestown — those chords are crazy, that harmony is insane, and the literature you’re speaking out of your mouth: that’s Sondheim. He’s there, even though his name isn’t on it.
Yes! The storytelling in Hadestown — the cyclical, recurring nature of it, and how the Fates are written — feels very Sondheimian to me. I’d love to know about your journey with that show.
I went through five rounds with Hadestown, and I had been in for them 13 times. So I knew the show very well before I got cast.
My dream role is still Persephone. I want to play it wherever I can, and honestly, one of the dreams is to play it on the West End. She’s a Sondheim girl. Persephone is absolutely a Sondheim girl. She’s such a deep well. She’s in love with her man — and that’s one of the biggest themes of Sondheim girls. They are in love with their men. As broken as those men are, and whatever ways they navigate that — sometimes the obsession is really absurd — but there’s a charm to the way these women approach their devotion. And Persephone absolutely does that.
I got the beautiful opportunity to understudy her on tour here. I just love that woman. She is a pillar of strength. She is willing to fall into addiction to love her man. And that is such a Sondheimian tradition — to be consumed by a love so tough that it kills you, that it eats you alive. That’s Mrs. Lovett, that’s Fosca in Passion, that’s the Witch in Into the Woods. I am willing to sacrifice my life for the truth of this obsession. With the Witch, it’s her daughter — that mother wound. And we don’t often see the redemption story that we see in Sunday in the Park with George with these women. Most of them end up being consumed. We watch Persephone go on this journey to self that also includes her journey back to her husband — through this tortured, broken, addictive, all-consuming thing that she has to wade through. It’s so Sondheimian. I really do think so.
Beyond Persephone, do you allow yourself to have specific roles in mind, where you say, “In ten years, I want to have played this?”
A thousand percent. I absolutely have those roles in mind, and I think I’m conditioned to have them. Mrs. Lovett is at the top of my dream roles list right now. I love her. I want to play her — yesterday, ideally. She is so complex, in the sense that I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who is okay with silver. She says it: I’m okay with taking silver. And I’m like, whoa. You know you’ll never be gold — you know that — and you’re willing to gamble your life on playing second place? I want to embody that. I’ve got to figure that out in my own mind, because even in this conversation I’m thinking, go for the gold. And this is a woman who knew that wasn’t even possible, and was like, I’m okay with second place.
Do you remember the first time you were conscious of a show you encountered being by Sondheim?
The first time was when I was in college for musical theatre. My first summer stock — shout out to Clinton Area Showboat Theater in Clinton, Iowa. It was my first time doing theatre outside of Ohio, which is where I’m from, and I was the Witch in Into the Woods. I was also the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. And then during that same period, in undergrad, we did Merrily We Roll Along as a staged reading — music stands and binders — and I got to play Scotty.
Putting those two together, how difficult both were for me, I thought: why is this so hard? Why are these two shows so difficult? And then I noticed the same name. I was very much learning the art of musical theatre and the business of musical theatre simultaneously in undergrad. Being able to have that conversation with myself — oh, there’s something about this man that calls something forth in me that I don’t yet know I need for this art form — and putting those pieces together was like, I need to know more of him, more of this style, this genre, this subsection of musical theatre, in order to be the best version of myself. Because only these shows were ripping something out of me that I didn’t know was in there — something I desperately need in order to be a craftsman in this art form.
Having run into his work a couple of times in my undergrad years, and it being the most difficult times, it was like, there’s something here that I need to find ease in, and that’s going to allow me to navigate this industry better.
I love that answer, because it connects right back to the present day — still learning, still discovering, still moving forward. Are there songs in your March 22 show that you’ve never performed in public before?
Oh, definitely. There are definitely songs where I’m still going, “Now, what’s that word? How does that go?!” Because, first of all, he loves a 10-page song. Can we talk about that?
I’ve never performed my opening number before in public, ever. I’ve never performed the specific song I’m doing from Sweeney Todd in person. I have performed “By the Sea” in person, but I’ve never done “The Worst Pies in London”. And then most of the second half of the show I have not performed in person. There are 10 songs in the second half, and six of them I have never performed live.
Nyla Watson performs A Sondheim Girl at The Green Room 42 on 22nd March. A livestream will be available to watch for up to one week after the performance.
Click here for tickets and more information.
✍️ Please support our work by upgrading to a premium subscription:
The Sondheim Hub exists solely thanks to the generous support of our readers. Please consider supporting our work for a few dollars each month. A premium subscription gives you full access to The Sondheim Hub: an exclusive essay, crossword, extended interview & more each week, plus our complete, paywall-free library of 250+ essays, features & interviews. 📚